The Law defines legal, economic and organizational principles of state regulation of innovation activity in Ukraine. The objects of innovation activity are:
- innovation programs and projects;
- new knowledge and intellectual products;
- production equipment and processes;
- infrastructure of production and entrepreneurship;
- organizational technical decisions of production, administrative, commercial or other nature, which significantly improve the structure and the quality of production and (or) social sphere;
- raw materials, means of their mining and processing;
- commodity output;
- mechanism of consumer market forming and sale of commodity output.
The subjects of innovation activity may be natural persons and (or) legal entities of Ukraine, natural persons and (or) legal entities of foreign states, stateless persons, their associations, which conduct innovation activity in Ukraine and (or) attract property and intellectual values, invest own or borrowed funds in the implementation of innovation projects in Ukraine.
Universities activities from primarily regulated by the Law of Ukraine "On Higher Education". This Law hasn’t questions concerning innovative activities, innovative research, but Chapter 10 of Law is devoted to research and scientific activities in the universities. In this chapter discusses the purpose and objectives of scientific and scientific-technical activities in higher education, organization and management of scientific and technical activities. Also it has links to two documents – to the Law of Ukraine " On Higher Education " and the Law of Ukraine "On the scientific and technical activities", the second one determines legal, organizational and financial principles of operation and development of scientific and technical sphere, creates conditions for scientific and scientific-technical activities, ensuring needs of society and the state in technological development.
Legal documents regulating the activity of universities can be divided into two groups: base and specific. Base acts are laws, which regulate economic activity in general, and these laws itself do not create the special favorable conditions for establishing of innovation business.
Specific laws are laws and legal acts, which take into account the specific of scientific and technical and innovation activity, such normative acts which more or less expressly determine the subjects of innovation sphere. We will consider Laws of Ukraine “About general principles of creation and functioning of the special economic zones (further SEZ) in Ukraine”, “About the special mode of investment and innovation activity of technological parks in Ukraine” and Statute about the order of creation and functioning of technoparks and innovation structures of other types. As Ukraine is a young state, there is not enough experience on establishing technoparks; moreover nowadays there are some confusions in legislation background of technoparks activity.
So, in the Law of Ukraine “About SEZ” technopark and technopolis are considered as such special economic zone. It automatically determines the order of their creation, essence of which is that technostructure is created by the Parliament of Ukraine after presentation of the Government, President of Ukraine or local governments. Such process of establishing, obviously, cannot assist to development of technostructure, as, at first, creation takes the heap of time; secondly, enterprises and other organizations can not support this technopark, and thirdly, technoparks in this terms are dependent on Government.
Moreover it is not the same technopark and SEZ, as there is a wide difference between them: different goals, different organizational aspects. So, the representatives of universities or scientific units are necessarily presence in the organization structure of technostructure, moreover they act leading part in the management of technopark activity; unlike SEZ, where such role belongs to public authorities and local government. The process of decision making about implementation of innovation & investment project changes according to it. Also approval of project of activity and constituent documents is carried out by Committee for support of the technoparks and other innovation structures development and has aimed to receipt of innovation status. It means actually that a definite economy subject can be a technopark structure, but formally not be legislatively acknowledged, and consequently, do not get definite preferences.